Intel is firing a shot across the bow for anyone trying to do X86 emulation without ponying up licensing fees to Intel. “…we fully expect other companies to continue to respect Intel’s intellectual property rights.” Axios points out, “Microsoft and Qualcomm have announced plans for a version of Windows 10 on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 that uses emulation to run older applications designed for x86-based Windows machines.”

Emulation (software mimicking hardware) is important for the advancement of microprocessors. Emulation can be used for older workloads instead having to buy expensive, overpowered hardware to maintain something that could run on a much cheaper component. Emulation comes in so that you don’t have to completely rewrite your legacy stack because you can’t get new hardware for it to run on. This will be a story that won’t end anytime soon.

Department of Choice Concepts

Gene Kim weighed in on last week’s British Airways debacle. Gene wrote a fictitious letter that is what Willie Walsh should have written. “The accident last week was not due to a power failure, or an IT failure — this was a business failure. After all, we were unable to perform some of our most critical business operations for nearly three days.” Bravo! 👏👏👏

Also from Gene Kim land, 2017 State of DevOps Report is out. There are a lot of takeaways from this report but one of the key findings stands out to me: Dimensions of transformational leadership. High performing teams have leadership that shares five characteristics; vision, intellectual stimulation, recognition, inspirational communication, and “supportive leadership”.

Department of Sane Workplaces

This reddit thread exploded this week. A new, junior member of a development team was given shoddy documentation with production connection string, credentials, and table names to setup their dev environment. No one told them that they shouldn’t actually use that information and they ended up blowing away the production database. It’s a great read (yes, even the comments, to an extent).

whoami

I'm Chris Short, 20+ veteran of the IT industry and 11 year veteran of the US Air Force. I help people and companies embrace DevOps practices and tools through writing and public speaking. I am a staunch advocate for transparency and open source solutions to problems.